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Let me start by saying that this contribution can, of course, only be an introduction to a subject that Trotsky and other Marxists spent many years analysing and writing about. However, I hope this discussion will broaden all of our understanding but also inspire us all to go away and read and study further.
1. Three conceptions of the Russian Revolution - One
Before we look at what happened in the years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, it’s worth starting with a quick review of the theoretical debates within Russian Marxism beforehand.
One of the last things Trotsky wrote on the Revolution was a summary looking back at three different “Conceptions of the Russian Revolution”.
1. Three conceptions of the Russian Revolution - One
Before we look at what happened in the years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, it’s worth starting with a quick review of the theoretical debates within Russian Marxism beforehand.
One of the last things Trotsky wrote on the Revolution was a summary looking back at three different “Conceptions of the Russian Revolution”.
He explained that all of the Russian Marxists understood that the immediate tasks facing revolutionaries would be to carry out the historic tasks already achieved by the bourgeois revolutions in France, Britain etc – to get rid of the feudal remnants of Tsarism and to distribute land to the peasants.
However, the Menshevik wing of the Russian movement argued that it would be wrong to go beyond such a bourgeois revolution towards socialism. Hadn’t Marx and Engels explained how capitalism had to first develop production sufficiently to create the conditions under which enough surplus could then be produced to distribute sufficiently and equitably to all?
Without that, as they put it, “want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced." (Marx/Engels, The German Ideology, 1846 – published 1932) ?
2. Three conceptions of the Russian Revolution – Two
"In an economically more backward country the proletariat may come to power sooner than in a country more advanced capitalistically ... upon coming to power the proletariat would inevitably push itself toward the management of the economy ... At what point the proletariat would be stopped will depend on the interrelation of forces. (Trotsky - 1906)
Trotsky, in his theory of Permanent Revolution, sharply disagreed. He explained that, in a country where capitalism had developed later historically, the weak Russian bourgeois class would be unable and unwilling to challenge the landlords and world imperialism.
Instead, for the Russian Revolution to succeed, it would need to be led by the only force with sufficient strength and collective organisation, the working-class (or proletariat), led by a revolutionary party. But the workers would not need to just stop there and hand power back to the capitalists – no, they should press ahead and start to build a socialist society based on a nationalised planned economy.
This is, of course, exactly what happened in 1917.
But the theoretical debates with Menshevism now became practical realities – how far could the workers lead a Revolution beyond just bourgeois tasks and build a socialist planned economy?
"The Russian revolution can achieve victory by its own efforts, but it cannot possibly hold and consolidate its gains by its own strength ... unless there is a Socialist revolution in the West. Without this condition restoration is inevitable ... for the small proprietor will inevitably turn against the proletariat” (Lenin - 1906)
Lenin’s initial formulations were slightly different to Trotsky but, essentially, both they, and the Bolshevik Party as a whole, arrived at the same position. They understood that the material conditions for building socialism did not yet exist in Russia, but they did exist on a world scale.
So, the answer to the conundrum of how socialism could be built in a backward country like Russia was to understand that socialism really is about changing the world – that our task is to secure the abolition of capitalism globally to allow the resources of both the most and least developed economies to be harnessed on an international scale.
As 1917 showed, the Russian workers and peasants could overthrow capitalism. However, in order to hold and consolidate its gains, the Revolution would need to be followed by further socialist revolutions in developed countries to give assistance to less developed Russia.
So, as long ago as 1906, Lenin made clear that, if Russia was left isolated and unable to develop its economy, then the middle class forces that might initially support the workers – the peasants, traders and small business owners – would turn against them and capitalism would be restored.
4. Capitalism breaking at its weakest link
"As a matter of fact, Marx never said that Socialism could be achieved in a single country and moreover in a backward country… the wonder is that under such exceptionally unfavourable conditions, [the] planned economy has managed to demonstrate its insuperable benefits” (Leon Trotsky, Marxism in Our Time, 1939)
If, in 1917, you had asked Lenin, Trotsky or, indeed, Stalin, whether their Revolution could survive over such a prolonged period when the working-class had failed to overthrow capitalism in any developed country – and that the Soviet Union would develop into a global superpower before its demise - they would probably have laughed at even the suggestion.
As Trotsky explained, the fact it survived for so long, despite its isolation and despite the horrors of Stalinist mismanagement and repression, is testament to the enormous gains that can be made through a planned economy – even in the distorted form it took in the Soviet Union. It confirms that, managed democratically on a global scale, we can indeed build a socialist society which can provide for all.
That’s why we need to analyse in more depth how Stalinism arose.
5. The revolution under immediate attack
The Bolsheviks didn’t just have to try and build socialism in an underdeveloped economy – they had to build it in an economy that was in a complete state of disintegration. From the start, they were faced with massive shortages, speculation and persistent sabotage by big business – which they countered through the nationalisation of most of the key branches of industry.
But the crisis was made even worse by the military intervention that started soon after as imperialism seized the opportunity to try and crush the Revolution while it faced such a vulnerable situation.
Winston Churchill - one of the strongest voices calling for firm military action against the ‘pestilence’ of Bolshevism - complained in later years that imperialism had not acted decisively enough – but what stopped them doing so?
6. A revolutionary army can succeed against the odds.
The defeat of imperialism and the ‘Whites’ in the Civil War provides an excellent example of how a revolutionary army can succeed against the odds.
Armies often reflect the nature of the regimes they support. The Red Army was driven by a determination to defend the Revolution, with many Bolshevik cadres going from the cities to help inspire the frontline and put some backbone into the many former Tsarist Officers. Trotsky himself played a key leadership role.
In contrast, the White Army was distinguished by drunkenness, looting and violence. While the Red Army fought for land to the peasants, the White Army stood for its restoration to the landlords.
But the Bolshevik programme didn’t only undermine the White Armies. The Bolshevik’s skilful propaganda and class appeal to the armies of intervention led to mutinies amongst forces from Britain, France and America. It was this that forced their Governments to withdraw.
When the reactionary Polish regime launched an offensive in 1920, London dockers refused to load arms on the Jolly George bound for Poland.
7. Revolution in Europe
For the Bolshevik leaders and the heroic cadres who gave their all in the Civil War, their real hope was for revolution elsewhere. The end of the First World War had heralded workers’ struggles in many countries. For example, the Red Flag was hoisted over the Clyde in the Scottish industrial heartland.
The Communist (Third) International or Comintern was formed in 1919 to help build that global struggle.
Unfortunately, by then the weakness of the revolutionary leadership outside Russia was already being exposed.
Chief amongst a number of setbacks was the defeat of the 1919 soviet government that had taken power in Hungary, and, above all, the defeat of the 1918 revolution in Germany which led to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the outstanding revolutionary leaders of the German workers' movement, being murdered at the hands of the military counter-revolution.
8. Undefeated but isolated and exhausted
By 1921, the hard-fought victory in the Civil War was proof of the huge reserves of support that the Russian Revolution could draw upon, based on the Bolshevik’s revolutionary programme.
But the Bolsheviks had been left with an even more difficult situation from which to build:
* Counter-revolutionary armies were being beaten back ...
* ... but German and other revolutions also defeated
* Many Bolshevik cadres had died on war fronts
* Output of large-scale industry at 14% of 1913 level
* Working-class population of Petrograd halved
* Agricultural production was also falling with famine killing five million between 1921-2.
The famine had been a product of the Civil War and the "War Communism" policies carried out by the Bolsheviks in a desperate effort to defend the Revolution and hold out until support came in the shape of a successful revolution elsewhere. Food supplies were being requisitioned from the peasantry to feed the Red Army and the cities but the collapse in industry meant there were no manufactured goods being made to exchange for their produce.
As the old joke goes, if you want to get to Socialism, I wouldn’t have started from here ... but they had no other starting-point!
9. The Bolshevik cadre and soviet democracy were also victims of civil war
The Civil War hadn’t only stretched the economy and the Red Army to its very limits; it had also inevitably severely undermined the fledgling Soviet democracy.
The Soviets, the action committees of workers, soldiers and peasants, born out of revolutionary struggle, had mushroomed during and straight after the Revolution into a network of local, regional and national committees to act as the organs of revolutionary direct government. But Civil War led to the disintegration of the organised working-class. Short of food, hundreds of thousands of workers left the cities for the countryside. Many activists were fighting on the front lines. The Soviet structures simply stopped working.
The All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the supreme authority of the republic, only met annually between November 1918 and December 1922, instead of every three months. By 1921, even its Executive was meeting only three times a year. In order to maintain the workers’ state, power and decision-making had to become centralised and increasingly rested with the Party’s Central Committee and its Political Bureau.
This was absolutely not the choice that the Bolsheviks wanted to make. It was intended as a temporary measure until conditions improved but marked a significant step away from workers’ democracy. Not surprisingly, there were factions within the Party that opposed the growing centralisation. But what was the alternative given that real soviet democracy simply could not function under Civil War conditions?
The rights of factions were maintained and vehement debates continued within the Bolshevik Party. However, at the party congress in March 1921, which had been dramatically cut across by the peasant sailors’ mutiny at the naval base of Kronstadt, delegates voted that organised factions within the party had to be temporarily dissolved.
Initially, despite supporting the counter-revolution, the Right Social Revolutionaries were also still allowed to organise . The Mensheviks still held their Party Conference in Moscow in 1920 but, following the Kronstadt mutiny, all opposition parties were also banned.
10. New Economic Policy – “A Strategical Retreat” at the 1921 Congress
So what was the way forward to buy the Revolution more time?
The Party Congress in March 1921 agreed that they had no choice but to make concessions to the capitalists and richer peasants who dominated agricultural production. Instead of the requisitioning of ‘War Communism’, the Congress adopted what was called the "New Economic Policy" (NEP) – introducing profit incentives to step up production for the market, as a means of feeding the towns and reviving industry. Smaller workshops were denationalised and could be claimed back by former owners. Farmers were now allowed to sell food on the open market and could employ people to work for them. Quite quickly, the NEP succeeded in improving the economy. By 1922 industrial output had risen to 25 percent of the 1913 level, though mainly in the light industry supplying the peasants' demand.
Why hadn’t this been done before? Well, in doing so, the Bolsheviks were taking a big risk. They may have stopped the Revolution being defeated by force of arms, but the workers and peasants now faced just as dangerous an enemy but one hidden in their midst – a strengthened capitalist class.
Lenin summed it up in a speech in Oct 1921: “The issue in the present war is who will win: the capitalist, whom we are allowing to come in by the door, and even by several doors, or proletarian state power? On the one hand, if capitalism gains by it, industrial production will grow, and [this] would mean the restoration of a proletarian class engaged in [socially useful] production in big factories, and not in profiteering, not in making cigarette-lighters for sale, and in other [such] “work” ... which is inevitable when our industry is in a state of ruin. The whole question is who will take the lead ... Who will come out on top? Either the capitalists succeed in organising first - in which case they will drive out the Communists and that will be the end of it. Or the proletarian state power, with the support of the peasantry, will prove capable of keeping a proper rein on the capitalists”
11. The rise of the ‘NEP- men’ & the bureaucracy
“We threw out the old bureaucrats, but they have come back ... they wear a red ribbon in their buttonholes and creep into warm corners ... We must fight this scum again and again ... and keep it under the surveillance of communist workers and peasants known for more than a year” (Lenin, answering questions at the Petrograd Soviet, 1919.)
Lenin and Trotsky were right to turn to the NEP – but they were right to fear its dangers too.
The richer peasants or ‘kulaks’ and a new breed of middlemen and speculators – the so-called "NEP-men" - took advantage of the continuing shortages to line their own pockets.
Now, to start with, every workers' state will have to operate with the economic means it has inherited from capitalism. It will have to apply some of the methods of capitalism and use the skilled officials trained under capitalism – both military and managerial – but subject them to workers’ control.
However, Russia after the Civil War wasn’t just facing an acute shortage of goods. There was also an acute shortage of educated and trained workers with time to carry out administrative duties and participate in soviet decision-making. That meant having to rely on a growing layer of officialdom without the check of genuine workers’ democracy.
The Party also now needed to be renewed and expanded if workers’ democracy was going to be rebuilt. The Bolshevik – now Communist - Party - increased its membership from 115,000 at the beginning of 1918 to 650,000 in March 1922. Many of those new recruits were militant workers and youth attracted to the party of the revolution. But, inevitably and increasingly, various careerists, including bureaucrats and NEP-men, started to join too.
No wonder in his 1919 contribution above Lenin talks about those ‘known for more than a year’ Lenin also added “How can one really decide whether a person is in the Party because of his convictions or for gain? The date he joined the Party must be entered on his Party card, he must not be given the card until he has been tested, until he has been through probation”
As Lenin put it to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 “We now have a vast army of government employees, but lack sufficiently educated forces to exercise real control over them”.
12. The basis of bureaucratic rule
“When there are enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come when they want to. When there are a few goods, the purchasers can come when they want to. When there are a few goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the Soviet bureaucracy. It 'knows' who is to get something and who has to wait". (Leon Trotsky,The Revolution Betrayed)
The balance of forces in Russian society was tilting away from the working class. The genuine Marxist cadre was at risk of being drowned out. Through the bureaucracy, the pressure of the NEP-men and the reactionary classes was being exerted upon and within the Russian workers' state.
Trotsky famously explained the rise of the bureaucracy by analogy with a policeman in charge of a food queue.
When the workers’ state faces a shortage of the necessities of life, the state – the policeman controlling the queue – is needed to keep order. But inevitably, the official will make sure they get their share in good time – at the expense of the workers at the back of the queue if necessary. Of course, for a small token of appreciation, if someone can avoid queuing by persuading the policeman to put something aside for them as well ... Then the state acts in their interests too.
Despite the best efforts of Lenin, the problem got steadily worse:
"The [state] machine refused to obey the hand that guided it. It was like a car that was going not in the way the driver desired but in a direction someone else desired: as if it were being driven by some lawless, mysterious hand... perhaps of a profiteer, or of a private capitalist, or of both” (Lenin at the 1922 Party Congress)
13. Lenin – State and Revolution
“ The measures [to guard against bureaucracy] were specified in detail by Marx and Engels:
1) not only election, but also recall at any time;
2) pay not to exceed that of a workman;
3) immediate introduction of control and supervision by all, so that all may become ‘bureaucrats’ for a time and that, therefore, nobody may be able to become a ‘bureaucrat’ ”.
As above, Lenin had, in advance, based on what Marx and Engels had written previously about the lessons of the 1871 Paris Commune, explained what was necessary to guard against bureaucracy in a workers’ state.
Yes, a state would be needed to defend and organise the gains of the revolution but, contrary to the capitalist state, now the exploited majority would be organising to stop the opposition of the exploiting minority, instead of the other way around. Over time, as the remnants of capitalism were overcome, the need for that special state machine would start to disappear.
As Lenin put it, “The [capitalist] exploiters are unable to suppress the people without a highly complex machine... but the people can suppress the exploiters with a very simple 'machine'... by the simple organisation of the armed masses (such as the Soviets)”.
14. The rise of the bureaucracy - & Stalin
But, instead of ‘withering away’, the state bureaucracy got bigger and more confident to carve out – and then protect – its privileges. Why? Because, in the end, not even the best Party and Programme can hold out against unfavourable material conditions. Despite the best efforts of Lenin and Trotsky, the conditions for healthy workers’ democracy did not exist. Instead of social relations equalising, inequality grew greater, and the parasitic bureaucracy grew bigger with it.
Under the NEP, to make sure that the specialists, administrators and technicians needed to run industry were secured, wage differentials between the lowest and highest paid workers were allowed to widen to 1:8. However, those privileges did not extend to Party members. A party maximum – a wage ceiling for all Communists equal to the average wage of a skilled worker – applied. Lenin’s Party was not the party that then arose under Stalin and beyond where Party leaders lived a life of luxury.
The bureaucracy knew their privileges would be at risk if the Party succeeded in developing genuine workers’ control and management. They needed to make sure the Party met their needs, not those of the workers and poor peasants. In Stalin, they found their man.
Stalin had been given the job of General Secretary in 1922 – intended by Lenin to be only an administrative role to support an expanded Central Committee. But Stalin discovered he could use the position – and the centralisation of Party decision-making - to install his own followers as branch, district and provincial secretaries. This gave him effective control over the day-to-day implementation of policy and the election of congress delegates. Through Stalin, the bureaucracy's position was consolidated within the party apparatus.
To make matters worse, Lenin was now seriously ill and soon to suffer from a series of strokes – he was unable to authoritatively act on his own concerns at the rise of the bureaucracy.
15. ‘New Course’ needed
As Trotsky started to point out with ever greater insistency, a bureaucratic Party regime isn’t just intolerable in terms of democracy, without the input of rank-and-file workers in touch with ‘living reality’ in their workplaces and communities; it also results in serious mistakes being made.
At the April 1923 Congress, Trotsky drew attention to one of those mistakes – the so-called ‘Scissors Crisis’ – the lagging behind of industrial production (and hence a growing divergence between rising prices of industrial goods and falling agricultural prices). This risked a serious division between the city and the countryside. The congress accepted Trotsky's arguments for a new turn within the framework of the NEP: to develop the state sector on the basis of a central plan, and to expand industry, to eventually absorb and eliminate the private sector.
Trotsky also argued that there needed to be a return to party democracy, an end to a Party “on two storeys: the upper storey, where things are decided, and the lower storey, where all you do is learn of the decisions”. The new generation needed to be given their say, and party appointments being made from above had to stop.
Workers’ frustrations at harsh conditions produced a wave of strikes. The Declaration of 46 leading members supported Trotsky’s call for change (although even many of the 46 hedged their bets by adding various caveats by their signatures – showing the fear that already existed about being seen to be in opposition to the leadership)
In a series of articles in Pravda, Trotsky argued for this ‘New Course’, which was enthusiastically received by many of the youth and workers in the party ranks. The debate was to be resolved at the thirteenth conference, meeting in January 1924.
16. 1923-24 - a decisive turning point
Sadly, other events intervened that provided further objective reasons why Stalin and the bureaucracy would prevail.
During 1923, there had been further blows to the chances of overcoming the Soviet Union’s isolation. Further revolutionary situations in Bulgaria and, critically, Germany, had been squandered, not least due to the poor advice coming from Stalin and the Comintern.
These setbacks demoralised even the most confident Party militants. It was clear that no relief could be expected from the workers of Western Europe in the months or years ahead. Perhaps, some began to conclude, Stalin’s “realism” was justified.
Nevertheless, the Opposition still had majority support amongst, for example, the Moscow Party branches. But the party bureaucracy resorted to vote-rigging, excluding Opposition delegates to ensure an overwhelming majority for them at the Thirteenth Conference.
Then, in a further blow to morale, came news of Lenin's death. Alarmed by the direction the Party regime was taking, Lenin had already written a statement before his last stroke left him paralysed – his ‘Testament’ – setting out his criticisms of the Party leadership but, specifically, Stalin. This was meant to be tabled at the next Party Congress in May 1924 but Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev manoeuvred to make sure its contents were concealed from most of the Party.
Supposedly in recognition of the need for Party regeneration, a “Lenin levy” was enacted by the leadership whereby, between February and May 1924 some 240,000 new workers were admitted. But Stalin’s real intention was to drown the revolutionary militants in a sea of inexperienced new members likely to ‘follow the line’ rather than think for themselves.
“By freeing the bureaucracy from the control of the proletarian vanguard, the ‘Leninist levy’ dealt a death blow to the party of Lenin” (Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed).
17. The invention of ‘Trotskyism’
In order to consolidate their grip on the Party and to steal the authority of Bolshevism for themselves, the bureaucracy set out to rewrite history and invent the sin of “Trotskyism” as a means to besmirch the Opposition.
This CPGB pamphlet from May 1925, at the beginning of the process, is highly revealing – because it shows the reality that the Stalinists then set out to hide – that in the eyes of the militant workers of the world, Lenin and Trotsky were, together, the leaders, “the historical giants” of the Russian Revolution!
Zinoviev and Kamenev, belatedly recoiling from the monster that they had helped to create, joined forces with Trotsky and the Opposition in 1926 in a struggle to oppose Stalin and the bureaucracy.
Without answers to their political criticism, Stalin resorted to further intimidation. Trotsky and other Oppositionists were shouted down when they tried to speak at Party meetings. In the face of this witch-hunt, the Opposition nevertheless managed to hold mass demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad to mark the tenth anniversary of the October revolution in 1927 with banners demanding "Let us turn our fire to the right - against the kulak, the nepman and the bureaucrat“ and "Let us carry out Lenin's Will";
At the fifteenth congress, in December 1927, not one Oppositionist was permitted to attend as a delegate. Marxist opposition to the rule of the bureaucracy was now driven underground. The fair-weather friends, Zinoviev and Kamenev, surrendered to Stalin. Trotsky himself was expelled, exiled, then deported from the SU in 1929 (to eventually be murdered in 1940).
18. The Falsification of History
There are many other important points that I have only time to briefly mention.
The falsification of history that became Stalin’s trademark - and was satirised by Orwell and others – is shown here in the airbrushing of Trotsky and Kamenev from their positions on the steps besides Lenin.
The crushing of the post-revolutionary flowering of art and the counter-revolution in the Party’s position on Women are both reflected in the two versions of the famous (Strakhov) poster.
The original 1920 headline “8 March - Day of Emancipation of Women” was changed by 1926 to the assertion that “You are now a free woman: help build Socialism!
In 1936 - until after Stalin’s death - abortion was actually outlawed. After all, according to the bureaucrats, no woman should have the right to refuse the ‘joys of motherhood’ under socialism …
19. ‘Socialism in one country’
As late as 1924, Stalin still held to the long accepted principle that socialism could not be built in Russia alone. But, from 1925, the regime promoted the idea that, while international revolution might still be some distant goal, for the foreseeable future, they should just build ‘socialism in one country’.
But capitalism has developed as a world system for a reason. The Soviet Union did not possess the resources to develop productive forces fully on its own. Socialism requires taking over the “commanding heights” of the world economy, not in one country alone.
However, the isolation of the Soviet Union was precisely what had given rise to the bureaucracy. A commitment to revolutionary internationalism stood in the way of their goals – to consolidate their privileges.
20. From China to Spain
The abandonment of ‘permanent revolution’, of genuinely building mass revolutionary parties internationally, led to the Comintern presiding over a series of disastrous defeats.
At first, they looked for opportunist short-cuts, currying favour with left-reformists and nationalists and effectively resurrecting the failed Menshevik idea of trusting in the ‘liberal bourgeois’. In 1927, this policy produced a catastrophic outcome in China when the Party’s backing of Chiang Kai-shek and the capitalist Kuomintang was repaid by Chiang’s massacre of Communists and workers in April 1927.
Trotsky had warned of this outcome in advance. But, as he explained to his supporters, while the sad confirmation of their perspective might attract a few thousand workers towards the Opposition, its effect on the millions would be further demoralisation – and so, through each defeat, came a strengthening of the bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy asserted: “ 'For the sake of an international revolution, the Opposition proposes to drag us into a revolutionary war. Enough of shake-ups! We have earned the right to rest. We will build the socialist society at home. Rely upon us, your leaders!' This gospel of repose... indubitably found an echo among the weary workers, and still more the peasant masses." (The Revolution Betrayed, p. 92)
From opportunism, Stalin then swung to an ultra-left position of refusing to work in a United Front with other left-wing forces. This disastrous policy split the German working-class and enabled Hitler to take power.
Changing course again, the Soviet bureaucracy then turned to arguing the theory of "two stages", confining their present goals to "bourgeois democracy" in the futile hope of reassuring global capitalism that the Comintern posed no threat to them. This was Menshevism not Bolshevism.
It marked a qualitative stage in the degeneration. From crass mistakes, the policy had now become one of deliberate betrayal of the workers' revolution internationally, as seen most clearly in Spain. GPU death squads were sent to help disarm the workers' militias and exterminate their leaders.
The Stalinists were petrified that the Spanish Revolution might inspire Russian workers into challenging their rule. It was no accident that it was at this time, (1937) that Stalin stepped up the repression and unleashed a regime of terror. Over a million were arrested in 1937/8, around a half executed, many others dying later in captivity.
All the surviving ‘Old Bolsheviks’, anyone who could still remember genuine Bolshevism, however much they had capitulated to Stalin, were seen as a threat to be obliterated.
In the "Moscow trials“ human wrecks that were once Stalin’s allies were framed and cowed into confessing to murder, sabotage and being agents of fascism. Of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th CP congress in 1934, 1,108 had been arrested by 1938 for "anti-revolutionary crimes“, 848 were shot dead. Of 139 central committee members, 98 were shot.
Of the 1½ million CP members in 1939, only 1.3% had belonged since the October revolution. Of Lenin's central committee of 1917, only Stalin survived as a leader. Any last traces of the Bolshevik Party were eradicated.
However, most of the Left Oppositionists remained revolutionaries to the end. Despite torture, they did not confess. They ended their lives still, literally, holding their banners high in the concentration camps of Siberia, both old Bolsheviks and young militants who had joined the Opposition. Over a thousand took part in a hunger strike of 132 days before being murdered.
22. “The Complete Triumph of Socialism"?
"Soviet forms of property on a basis of the most modern achievement of American technique transplanted into all branches of economic life – that would indeed be the first stage of socialism. Soviet forms with a low productivity of labour mean only a transitional regime whose destiny history has not yet finally weighed” (Leon Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed - 1937)
It wasn’t just internationally that the ignorant Stalin’s policies stumbled one way and then the other, but in terms of the Soviet economy as well.
While the NEP had increased production, the regime had done nothing to counter the growing inequalities that came with it. In fact, Bukharin, then the regime Right’s theoretician (but about to be ousted!), had summed up their policy to the capitalist kulaks as “Get Rich!”. They were even toying with denationalising land altogether.
By 1927, precisely as the Opposition had warned, the kulaks, far from moving towards socialism, were threatening capitalist counter-revolution. Having cornered most of the supply, they withheld their grain from the market, threatening famine in the cities.
To counter the kulak threat, the Left Opposition had been urging moves to encourage the voluntary collectivization of the land. As Lenin had also always explained, this required providing technology, tractors, electricity and so on to the model farms to persuade the poor peasant of its advantages over individual smallholdings. They had also called for increased taxation on the kulaks and a five-year plan to provide those industrial goods.
Suddenly, Stalin now lurched in an ultra-left fashion to enact forced collectivization by decree and to adopt the five year plan – but to announce that it should be achieved in four-years!
From the proportion of farms being collective of under 2%, by 1932 it was already over 60%, by 1936 nearly 90%. This adventurist policy may have eliminated the capitalist kulaks but it very nearly eliminated agriculture too! Without patient explanation, the peasants saw it just as robbery and slaughtered their animals for a quick sale. The collective farms were set up on the basis of existing equipment suited for small-scale farming, not modern large-scale agriculture. An estimated ten million people perished as a direct consequence of the famine that resulted.
In a distorted fashion, Stalin’s implementation of a planned industrialisation, so long argued for by the Opposition, demonstrated the enormous potential of a planned economy. While the capitalist world was plunged into the Depression of the 1930s, Soviet industrial production leapt ahead. Huge construction and electrification projects were carried through. By 1935 the Soviet Union already produced more tractors than any other country in the world.
But, under bureaucratic rule, it took place at a terrible cost. Without any input from below, demands ordered from the bureaucrats’ offices were often completely unrealistic but failure to meet them was treated as sabotage. The productivity of labour remained low. Workers were driven on through a combination of bribes and threats. Forced labour was also used on a vast scale.
23. State Capitalism or Bonapartism?
"Stalin guards the conquests of the October Revolution not only against the counter-revolution, but also against the claims of the toilers [and] their dissatisfaction ... Leaning for support on the topmost layers of the new social hierarchy against the lowest - sometimes vice versa - Stalin has attained the complete concentration of power in his own hands. What else should this regime be called, if not Soviet Bonapartism?" (Trotsky, Writings 1934-35)
Despite the crimes of Stalinism, Trotsky and the Opposition continued to defend the gains of the October revolution - the state-owned and planned economy – and opposed those who, looking at the surface only, saw in the Stalinist dictatorship and inequality, a regime of “state capitalism”.
Yes, a bureaucratic counter-revolution had taken place but to create a degenerated workers’ state still based on nationalised property forms. Their privileges did not come from their ownership of production but their control over distribution – the police of the bread queue. The bureaucracy were not a capitalist class, they were a parasitic caste, a bloated state standing above society but reliant for its privileges on the development of the planned economy.
This is certainly not the only time in history when, balancing between the contending classes, the State had been able to operate with increasing independence from them. Marx explained how, as the French Revolution waned, Napoleon Bonaparte, acting as a military dictator, crushed the toilers’ attempts to go further but did not make any attempt to restore feudalism. He defended and protected the new bourgeois property relations. It was a regime of bourgeois Bonapartism.
Trotsky extended that analysis to the Soviet Union, showing that, in these conditions, one individual – whether it be Napoleon or Stalin – could have power concentrated largely in their hands - and the zig-zags that came with that as Stalin’s regime veered this way and that balancing between the proletarian and capitalist pressures on them, internally and internationally. However, in doing so, Stalin defended the planned economy – it was a regime of proletarian Bonapartism.
Those technicalities matter because they explain why, for Trotskyists, the workers of the Soviet Union (and the other deformed workers’ states formed after WW2 in the image of the Soviet Union) did not need to change the economic foundations of their society – they only required a political revolution, putting in place the ideas Lenin had set down in the State and Revolution, to overthrow the bureaucracy and restore workers’ democracy.
However, some Trotskyists forgot that the temporary equilibrium that had allowed the bureaucracy to rise above society might also be ended another way – through the restoration of capitalism.
24. From backward economy to a superpower
The outcome of WW2 (despite Stalin’s blunders and his paranoid purge of the Red Army high command) meant that this unusual stalemate, allowing the bureaucracy to continue in place, was maintained for far longer than anyone, including Trotsky, had imagined.
The Soviet Union, aided by the resilience of a planned economy, had defeated Hitler and expanded its influence across Eastern Europe. Even then, the nationalist limitations of Stalinism meant the full potential of what could have been an extended plan across the region was never realised. Nevertheless, by being able to allocate resources directly through the state planning bodies, instead of by the capricious workings of market forces, the Soviet Union continued to develop from a backward economy to a world superpower, a pioneer, for example, of space travel.
By the 1960s, in the production of basic industrial commodities, the USSR was entering the same league as the main capitalist powers. The same was true for simple goods like shoes – but continued to lag behind where more technology was required, like artificial fibres.
The main ‘Achilles Heel’ of the Stalinist economy was quality. Imposed targets, usually based on volume, could be met by cutting corners – and, without workers and consumers being able to complain and then influence production (nor, as under capitalism, through the play of market forces), substandard goods were churned out. For the privileged officials, who had access to special shops, the low quality of many consumer goods was not a problem they had to be worried about. (For example, in Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky balanced the fact that the SU now produced more tractors than any other country, with another statistic - that in the previous year a staggering 81% of them were in need of repair!)
Without workers’ control and management, there was also the huge wastage, up to 30% of production, due to the bungling, corruption and bad planning inherent in the undemocratic command system of economic management. There was massive uncontrolled environmental degradation too.
25. Who buried who?
In 1956, Krushchev, who took over from Stalin, was famously said to have told Western diplomats that “History is on our side. We will bury you!”
At that stage, the Soviet Union was experiencing economic growth perhaps as high as 10%, easily outstripping world capitalism.
However, as time went on, rather than the ‘booms and slumps’ of capitalism, there was a steady decline in Soviet growth. While a command economy was, with all its overheads, able to develop initial industrialisation, as the economy became more complex, needing the application of modern technology, the impossibility of planning everything from the centre without working-class input from below became more and more stark.
The material incentive was also weaker, since the bureaucrats by then already had an opulent life-style, so managers were content to sit back and enjoy their privileges.
Workers’ lives had improved significantly – with low housing and food costs and, for example, provision of white goods. Healthcare and education improved significantly. However, the parasitic bureaucracy was choking society.
By the end of the 1960s, growth rates were falling. Productivity of labour also continued to lag far behind. From the 1970s the economy started to stagnate and by the 1980s the plan began to break down entirely with individual managers having to bypass official routes to obtain raw materials and labour which had not been allowed for by the central planners.
Estimates now suggest that between 1975-1985 there was zero growth after taking out oil revenues and vodka sales (and the high levels of alcohol abuse speak for themselves!)
26. Capitalist Restoration
“Without the aid of a proletarian revolution in the West, [Lenin] reiterated time and again, restoration is unavoidable in Russia. He was not mistaken: the Stalinist bureaucracy is nothing else than the first stage of bourgeois restoration"
(Leon Trotsky, Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution, 1939)
Trotsky was right that we can learn, even from setbacks and counter-revolution. It’s crystal clear that, to succeed, a workers’ state needed democracy as a body needs oxygen. Without the input from the workplace and the consumers that would exist in a healthy workers’ state, it was impossible for bureaucrats in the Kremlin to run 100,000 industrial enterprises, producing over a million separate commodities.
Gorbachev, the Soviet leader from 1985 tried to revive the command economy through introducing elements of the market and decentralisation, and allowing the Soviet republics huge powers to make autonomous decisions. However, this accelerated the political disintegration due to an explosive growth of nationalism, which had been suppressed but not overcome ever since the days of Stalin.
This was the background to the eventual collapse and the restoration of capitalism – (a collapse dealt with separately in one of the closing rallies of Socialism 2019).
All I would add is that the regime could still have toppled the other way – through political revolution instead of capitalist restoration. The power of the workers was shown by the mass movements which deposed the dictatorships in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and elsewhere . However, the consciousness that existed, say, amongst the workers of Hungary in their 1956 Revolution of the need to overthrow the bureaucracy and build genuine socialism, had been weakened over the decades. Capitalism seemed to offer the only way forward – both to the majority of the bureaucracy and to the working-class (except, of course, the were in a position to fight for the spoils - while the workers suffered the dire consequences).
Let me leave the last word with Trotsky: “Even if the Stalinist bureaucracy should succeed in destroying the economic foundations of the new society, the experience of planned economy ... will have entered history as one of the greatest teachings of mankind". (Leon Trotsky, Stalinism and Bolshevism,1937)
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